Shirley Valentine Gave Pauline Collins a Role to Equal Her Talent. She Embraced It with Flair and Glee

During the 1970s, Pauline Collins emerged as a clever, humorous, and appealingly charming actress. She grew into a recognisable celebrity on each side of the sea thanks to the blockbuster British TV show Upstairs Downstairs, which was the period drama of its era.

She portrayed Sarah, a bold but fragile servant with a shady background. Sarah had a romance with the good-looking chauffeur Thomas, acted by Collins’s off-screen partner, the actor John Alderton. This turned into a on-screen partnership that audiences adored, extending into follow-up programs like Thomas & Sarah and the show No, Honestly.

The Peak of Greatness: Shirley Valentine

Yet the highlight of her success occurred on the cinema as the character Shirley Valentine. This empowering, mischievous but endearing adventure set the stage for later hits like Calendar Girls and the Mamma Mia series. It was a uplifting, humorous, optimistic story with a excellent role for a seasoned performer, addressing the theme of women's desires that was not governed by traditional male perspectives about modest young women.

Collins’s Shirley Valentine prefigured the emerging discussion about women's health and women who won’t resign themselves to invisibility.

From Stage to Screen

It originated from Collins taking on the starring part of a lifetime in the writer Willy Russell's stage show from 1986: Shirley Valentine, the desiring and surprisingly passionate relatable female protagonist of an getaway midlife comedy.

She turned into the star of the West End and the Broadway stage and was then triumphantly selected in the smash-hit cinematic rendition. This very much paralleled the similar transition from theater to film of Julie Walters in Russell’s stage work from 1980, the play Educating Rita.

The Plot of Shirley Valentine

The film's protagonist is a realistic scouse housewife who is bored with existence in her middle age in a dull, lacking creativity country with monotonous, dull folk. So when she wins the opportunity at a no-cost trip in the Mediterranean, she grabs it with enthusiasm and – to the surprise of the dull English traveler she’s accompanied by – continues once it’s over to live the real thing beyond the resort area, which means a wonderfully romantic adventure with the charming local, Costas, played with an striking moustache and dialect by actor Tom Conti.

Bold, confiding Shirley is always speaking directly to viewers to tell us what she’s feeling. It got loud laughter in theaters all over the UK when Costas tells her that he loves her skin lines and she says to the audience: “Don't men talk a lot of rubbish?”

Subsequent Roles

After Valentine, the actress continued to have a active career on the stage and on television, including parts on Dr Who, but she was not as fortunate by the cinema where there seemed not to be a screenwriter in the class of the playwright who could give her a true main character.

She was in filmmaker Roland Joffé's passable Calcutta-set drama, City of Joy, in 1992 and played the lead as a English religious worker and captive in wartime Japan in Bruce Beresford’s the film Paradise Road in 1997. In director Rodrigo García's transgender story, 2011’s Albert Nobbs, Collins came back, in a sense, to the Upstairs, Downstairs setting in which she played a downstairs maid.

Yet she realized herself repeatedly cast in dismissive and overly sentimental elderly entertainments about the aged, which were unfitting for her skills, such as nursing home stories like Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War and the movie Quartet, as well as subpar located in France film The Time of Their Lives with the performer Joan Collins.

A Minor Role in Humor

Filmmaker Woody Allen provided her a genuine humorous part (albeit a minor role) in his the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, in which she played the shady clairvoyant referenced by the film's name.

However, in cinema, the Shirley Valentine role gave her a remarkable period of glory.